Prospect Lists - Phillies and Overall - 2022-2025

[allentown]

Churning the staff is not synonymous with positive change, although I do think the quality of those leading the scouting and development efforts currently are the best we''ve had going back to Arbuckle. I've seen many changes heralded as pointing to success, but the efficacy of changes must be evidenced in positive results. I've witnessed the Phillies ability to find and develop pitchers, catchers, and infielders.This has been largely true under many Phillies administrations and staffs going back years. Unfortunately, the ability to find and develop OFs, despite spending a lot of resources in the attempts, is also consistent going back many decades. The Phillies OFs in good years and bad for the MLB team have been largely built from trades, FA signings, and Rule 5. Rojas is our only homegrown OF today. Look at how many high draft pick/big bonus guys have bombed.

[zambonir]

Well, if you're going to go all the way back to Bourn then you also have to say they hit on Burrell, and did a great job developing (and professinally scouting if not amateur scouting) Victorino in AAA. Plus they hit the jackpot dumpster-diving for Werth, and later made a very savvy pick-up in Herrera who'd never played above AA. I'm just not sure there's actually a trend of failing on OFs for any particular reason, and certainly not one that applies to five different GMs (from Wade to now) and just as many if not more scouting and dev bosses. Every failure (such as Moniak and Haseley vs. Brown or Dylan Cozens) is different.

[nycphils]

Personally I’ve always wondered if the Phillies are just terrible with strength and conditioning. Over and over and over again in the last decade or more we hear that “so-and-so prospect just needs to gain strength” and they never seem to. Maybe it happens and I only remember the failures, but Roman Quinn, Carlos Tocci, Cornelius Randolph, Malquin Canelo, Luis Garcia, Simon Muzziotti, Rafael Marchan, Arquimedes Gambia and maybe even Adam Haseley all seem like failures of strength and conditioning.

Like I said, maybe it is just memory bias. However, who is the prospect where the frame filled out and power and exit velocity were added to make that guy a big leaguer?

[zambonir]

And at the same time both Gabe Kapler and Sam Fuld (in his job in between the Kapler era and becoming GM) were particularly focused on that, and much lip service was paid to spending more money on nutrition and training in the minors. I suspect it's still more about the inconsistent (and sometimes poor) hitting philosophy.

[Austinfan]

Failure to add strength in this day of scientific nutrition and training is more a scouting issue, maybe trainers should be involved in scouting in terms of projecting 16 LA or 18 HS players to 22 years old.

They have built up a number of pitchers with impressive velocity jumps.
So it may be more of a hitting mechanics issue.

[andyb]

Or maybe the guys that are big and strong and fast that also have some baseball acumen are generally the players that sign for the big bucks or are drafted in the high rounds?

One forgets that we have not had a bunch of high first round picks and we have also lost more than our share of second round picks and Latin American bonus pools. I am not a fan of Sal's negotiating skills in general (as opposed to scouting skills). I was also not a fan of drafting and development under Klentak where we seemed to have taken the wrong lessons from analytics.

We just need to be better pure and simple. We really have not had a huge number of raw high school athletes in our system so other than the top round failures maybe we just chose bad baseball players. Moniak for instance added plenty of strength. He just had a lousy hitting tool in general. And we bad mouthed Kingery for the power that clearly added to his game and tried to change him into something less effective. Like some people criticized Jimmy Rollins for the power that made him special at the plate.

We add plenty of strength to our prospects. We just likely need to start with better baseball players in the first place.

[allentown]

I don't see Burrell as a wonder of scouting or development. He was the MLB consensus 1.1 bat in the draft. He already knew how to hit. I don't think the Phillies really developed his hitting. Nor did they do much for his D, although I doubt anybody could. But, there's more to the story and that's Giles' cheap. By far the best player in that draft was J.D. Drew, whom the Phillies didn't even need to draft, because they could sign him as the draft approached, having drafted and not signed him the prior year [The Phillies didn't need to draft Drew the prior year. Although Giles always claimed he did it for the good of baseball, I've always believed he didn't want to spend a top of draft bonus on anyone that year. He could have easily avoided Drew, as a half dozen teams did the following year, and drafted Glaus, who was VERY well regarded across baseball pre-draft and had a great career. After all the flack over the Drew fiasco, the Phillies were under great pressure to actually draft a worthy player with their 1.1 and chose Burrell. A blind squirrel of a scouting organization would have picked Burrell in what was a weak draft class.]

I mentioned the Phillies adding talent through dumpster dives and Rule 5. I didn't dwell upon that because, as you acknowledge Werth and possibly Victorino were found by the Phillies major league scouts not the guys who scout amateurs. Werth came fully developed but missed the prior year injured when we signed him as a FA. The medical team gets a plus for that signing. I think our coaches did contribute substantially to Victorino's development. He was not MLB starter quality when we took him in Rule 5.

[allentown]

Or maybe the guys that are big and strong and fast that also have some baseball acumen are generally the players that sign for the big bucks or are drafted in the high rounds?

This is undoubtedly the case. The solution to that is not to go after the 20th best hitter in the draft or the 30th best international position player. Take the best pitchers you can find in LA. The bonuses are far lower and the other teams are focusing on hitters with their big $ bonuses. That evens our odds in the LA market: nobody can do a great job of assessing very young LA pitching prospect and we also can't assess young LA hitting prospects so we are no blinder than other teams when it comes to pitchers and seem do better developing those we end up with and it's the Moneyball approach -- taking value from a prospect demographic that the rest of baseball shuns for significant bonus signings. We know the best LA position talent isn't offered to the Phillies. Why would it be when the Phillies will pay the same for Jhailyn Ortiz as Toronto pays for Guerrero, Jr. Why offer A-level talent when the Phillies will pay $2.6 mill for the B- or C-level talent that was Yhoswar Garcia and pay out the full bonus after learning that they were cheated and Yhoswar was a year older than they thought and would miss a development year because of suspension? Is this incompetence? A very warped sense of honor? Someone in the organization getting kick-backs on these big bonuses? Can anyone think of another baseball organization which would have gone through with the Yhoswar signing, without even reducing the agreed upon bonus? That's not honor.

[fish]

And how can Jason Ochardt’s program stink in the Phillies org but result in so many big improvements for the Red Sox system? Some of it may have something to do with the poor depth in draft classes and international (aside from 2023 international) but the amount of money they’ve put into their facilities should surely be paying some dividends by now.

[zambonir]

And Josh Bonifay was good at his job with both the Astros and the Rangers (though I don't know that he had much of an impact on their championship).

[Matt_Winkelman]

My understanding is that under Klentak/MacPhail they bought and did everything and had no one with actual leadership, so various factions kept undermining each other. It certainly did not help that the mlb staff at the time was also terrible. The pitching side figured themselves out and got on the same page and I think Caleb Cotham, Travis Herget, and Brian Kaplan get a lot of credit there. The hitting side they essentially cleaned house after 2021 (Ochart had stayed on for the first Dombrowski year) just to build a unified approach and program. I don’t think it is working and I have problems with their player acquisition, but that is my understanding of why success can be had elsewhere after not here.

[fish]

With the exception of Eduardo Tait, the Phillies top prospects are early draft picks, and then there is everyone else. Improvements in hitting development just shouldn’t take this long. Barber seems adept at identifying “Dudes” - the guys with talent and tools early. Beyond that you’re left to pick talent or tools and develop it. He may be pretty good at identifying pitchers, but that still requires quantity that they don’t want him to spend resources on. As for hitting, their post 2nd round picks have been uninspired and largely unsuccessful. Still seems they are targeting the wrong type of guys and not improving the guys they do.

[bkox]

As for hitting, their post 2nd round picks have been uninspired and largely unsuccessful.

Ill do some more research tomorrow, but this seems to be the case for everyone. I just looked at all 20 rounds of the 2017 and 2016 drafts, Rounds 3-20 of those drafts have produced exactly 5 hitters who have produced 5 or more WAR in the MLB.

2018 did a little better with 6 above 5WAR. And a guy named Matt Vierling on the doorstep with 4.4

But that means over a 3 year span, only 11 hitters have developed enough to be worth 5 WAR from rounds 3-20. Thats about 1 per every 3 teams.

[Austinfan]

Which is what you'd expect, or why pay scouts?

Phillies have signed two undrafted players who are now on their top prospect lists in Anthony and Kemp.
Which is a good sign for college scouting.
Now if they can hit on a few from LA.

[andyb]

Phillies have signed two undrafted players who are now on their top prospect lists in Anthony and Kemp.

But few consider either of them a real prospect. This is far from evidence of the Phillies getting better at anything.

[zambonir]

I guess the question is, have we been spoiled by the fact that the two best homegrown Phillies power (or at least home run) hitters of this century were both 5th round picks, or should there have been more of those? I think the failings of the first and second rounders probably more of an issue (along with the loss of picks).

The pro scouting and development failure of the Cliff Lee and Cole Hamels trades also didn't help two different generations of Phillies teams.

The 2022 and 2023 teams still had four homegrown position players (with Vierling replaced by Rojas in 2023) plus Marsh who was acquired with one. That dropped to three with Hoskins' injury and departure, and now Rojas and Marsh appear to be just a single starting position. It has been a dry well since Bohm and Stott though they went for pitchers and HS players since then.

[Austinfan]

Doesn't matter. The point is they can recognize "hidden gems," and not merely the over scouted players at the top of the draft. They' taking measured chances, like MIller.

The problem in the past was too much reliance on athleticism, not enough on the skils needed to actually play the game. One of the keys to scouting is understanding what you can teach, and what relies on innate skills like vision, eye to hand coordination, mental processing, etc. Too many picks were "he's strong and athletic, we can teach him to hit."

[zambonir]

Too many picks were "he's strong and athletic, we can teach him to hit."

They haven't drafted like that in well over a decade. They just completely misjudged the guys they thought had hit tools (and those guys also didn't become stronger).

[andyb]

Every team has "hidden gems" as you see them though. Of the 250+ players in the system (every MLB system) only 50-75 are large bonus signings. I imagine every single team has a few players in their top 30 that signed for $100K or less and probably 8-10 players like that in their top 50. It is the nature of the business.

There just is not evidence that the Phillies are particularly good at this part of the business. Fangraphs just rated 30 players in our system as FV 35+ or better. Most teams average around 40 such players. You are just not putting any sort on analytical view on whether the system is good or average or bad. We have a system that is very very very very top heavy. We have players at the back end of our top 10 that would have trouble making the top 20 in some systems. Depth at the moment is our weakest point though you seem blinded by some marginal prospects like Kemp and Anthony.

Frankly the evidence is that we probably do an inferior job of finding these hidden gems than most organizations. And our overall system ranking (which might be in the teens overall) is really riding on the one time fact of Painter maintaining eligibility for 2 extra years because he got hurt.

[Austinfan]

Outside of 2016-2018, they're still not finding players in the top ten rounds, even bench quality guys.

It's bad enough to blow 1st and 2nd rd picks (at least they got better there after Moniak et al), but you need to find those above replacement guys to build depth for both the roster and trade fodder.

2012: Milner (7th)
2013: Crawford (1st), Knapp (2nd),
2014: Nola (1st), Hoskins (5th)
2015: [Randolph], Kingery (2nd), Falter (5th)
2016: [Moniak], Romero (4th), Irwin (5th), Hall (14th)
2017: [Haseley], Howard (2nd), Maton (7th), Brogdon (10th)
2018: Bohm (1st), Vierling (5th), O'Hoppe (23rd)
2019: Stott (1st)
2020: [Abel]
2021: Painter (1st)